Eternal Twilight
by HVK
Summary: Johnny comtemplates the mockery of his life in an unknown town. Occurs between JtHM and Squee!


Ah, my first JtHM fic and for that matter, my first angst fic. Read and review or the mop gets it. What, you don't care? Why not? Come on, you heartless bastards! WHY WON'T YOU CARE!

Disclaimer: I don't own Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. Good thing too; otherwise, it wouldn't be as delightfully twisted.

It was a knoll, resting over a peaceful town.There were thousands of those types of towns in America, no matter the clime or longitude. They seemed nice places, for the most part. People who smile and say hi. Preists who look enigmatic and look pleased. And flavoured cold treats in convenience stores.

It was a wonderful illusion. But pretty pictures, espically ones that you know, do not a reality make.

For those who know where to look, these are the most pleasant and worst of illusions. Those who knew knew where to find the parents that regarded their children as little more than burdens. The priests that believed in nothing. And Brain Freezies machines operated by beverage dictators.

Sure, it was quiet. But the man sitting in the old car atop the knoll knew better to assume that was it's essential nature.

He was young, but in appearance only. His thin frame was remnescient of a scarecrow given flesh, and the black sweat shirt with grey lined sleeves only enhanced that image. His sticklike legs, clad in baggy navy pants and a pair of boots with a metal toe split to resemble cloven hooves, were tapping slowly against the car's side as he looked down upon the bustling city. His spiky mass of dark blue hair, shaved at the sides, rustled in the bitter October wind that sent goosebumps up his lean back. His clawlike hands gripped the shaft of a pencil busily scratching out the beginnings of a comic strip depicting the nonsensical adventures of a steadily more and more stylized stick figure. And his narrow eyes, smudged dark by worry, sorrow and insomnia, contained a pair of anthracite-black pupils that scanned quickly over his work.

He frowned, chewing contemplatively on the pencil, lines growing clearer on his relatively unmarked face as he finally threw the unfinished comic down in disgust, thinking of things like the uneaten food he had never eaten, social maggots he had never avoided and the genuine peope he hadn't met. He had plenty of things to be disappointed about.

It had been a bad day, and given the track his train of thought was already boarding, it appeared to be a bad one as well.

But one thing had happened to please him. And it pleased him indeed. Oh, the immenseness of how it pleased him.

Ever since he had left Squee's house and the child's selfish father with a concussion, not to mention the disastrious call to his former girlfriend, Johnny C. had found something he hadn't known in a long time.

Peace. Or the rudimentary sort that he knew, anyway. But he had to take what he had, and he was content in that.

To be honest, he had no idea where he was, but in truth, he didn't care. He was where he was and alone, and as long as that wasn't the Realm of Eternal Screaming and Restlessness, he was content with that.

He had learned that it was simple, in an unknown town, to gain anomity simply by keeping your head down and not speaking to anyone. And had thus, gained a measure of solitude. Some probably gave him suspicious looks, but as long as he ignored them, he had no urge to messily evisicrete. For the most part.

Still, he was nearing the place that he had spent the majority of his life in, such as he knew it. Therefore, it had occured to him that it might me a Good Idea to record his thoughts on the situation. Disjointed they might be, but it was the thought that counts.

Glancing surrpetiously around, Johnny C. snapped open the glove compartment of the clanking machine he dared to call a car, pulling out a small red journal that didn't used to be red.

His hands had been stained so often when opening it, the red color had overlaid the original black. Opening it, Nny looked at the white pages yet unmarked.

So much blank space, waiting for merely the touch of ink or lead to transfer the essence of thought. You see the metaphorisim in that statement? Know the metaphorism; _worship _the metaphorism!

Chewing a moment on the pen he had snapped up, Johnny thought for a moment and began to write.

_Dear Die-ary:_

_Recently, I wrote in this book that when next I wrote, I hoped to be as cold as the moon that lit these pages._

_Regrettably, this fond hope has not yet been fulfilled. But things are getting at least a little better, so to speak._

_Die-ary, I'm so lost. Not that's a bad thing in itself, mind you. As long as you plan to do something about rather than celebrating it, anyway. _

_Lost in my own mind, and lost in the wilderness of my madness. I still don't understand how much of my motivation was my own._

_I guess it's wrong to kill for no reason, but really, sometimes one can't help oneself. There is no art in murder; it's just that. You get lost in the heat of the moment, in the overwhelming _need _to kill and revenge. _

_But, Jimmy. That idiotic sociopath. He did help me in one regard; he enabled me to realize the true horror of my actions, for the most part._

_I think that killing Jimmy (What kind of an idiot nicknames themself Darkness?) was one of the few genuinely good things I've done in my life. What he did to that girl was..was..I've tortured people to death in the most grotesque and creative ways possible, but at least I gave them their dignity! He violated them in ways that still disgust me!_

Johnny gritted his teeth, remembering with no small amount of fury, the rage that had filled him when he learned of Jimmy's imitations and more to the point, the sickening realization that his work was a better imitation of what he did than he'd have liked to admit.

In fact, he was so overcome, he neglected to notice the rip his pen gouged through the page before he heard the tear.

Groaning unhappily, he moved the pen to an area below the fortunately tiny rip, and began again.

_You know, I miss Devi. I have almost ever since I tried to immortilize the moment, which I hasten to say, was a bad idea. Stupid doughboys, convincing me to try and kill her; why did I ever listen to them?_

_Hmm, that reminds me. I think my troubles go back to the doughboys and their corruptive influence. _

_I'm sure that I have become aware of what I did as something unjustified. No matter how you look at it, the moment in which my life spiraled out of my control was when the monster in the wall took possession of it. Not that I have any real conception of when that was, but that's okay; it's the thought that counts._

_I still don't know what the monster looked like, nor exactly why it wanted to escape, or even if it was nothing more than a figment of my imagination. Perhaps, like me, it disliked being chained. But I still don't know why I had to keep it trapped. All I know is that it's the fault of the doughboys._

_I have no conception of what possessed me to repaint those two effigies of baking goodness; it's quite probable that even then, I was quite horrendously insane, and the two styrofoam things merely exerbated my condition. In any event, it was the corruptive influence of Psycho-Doughboy and Mr. Eff that was the spiral into my current state of affairs._

_In short, they screwed me over. _

_Psycho-Doughboy; I don't know what was wrong with him. He wanted me to die, so he could too and rejoin his master. Apparently, that was the monster in the wall. Another thing that manipulated me. To me, I guess he represented all that was depressing with me. Looking back, he sounds like a damn emo person! No wonder I was so messed up, having to listen to that twenty-four seven._

_Hmmm, that reminds me. I want a cherry brain freezy. _

Placing his book down, Johnny jumped out of the car.

He wondered exactly how he should go about this, and decided that the best way to locate a 24-7 was to look for one.

With that sage wisdom in mind, he walked down the knoll and into the town, feeling the trepidiation he always did when he went somewhere new.

Sometimes, he feared that it might overwhelm him, this scene-oriented xenophobia.

He expected to spend a while looking, every minute adding to his overall unhappiness and displeasure, seeing as it was in the usual nature of things; to his surprise, the first building he saw was the object of his valient quest.

_Yes,_ he thought. _The brain freezy is minw, mine I say!_

Grinning his crooked unsettling smile broadly, he ran to the front of the building, trying not to scream in glee.

Unfortunately, he had the misfortune to accidentally find a mugger that decided to occupy the same space as his body.

This, as any standard physicist can tell you, will result in disastrious consequences.

The unwitting mugger pulled out a gun, pointed it at our protaganist's head and said, "Give all you got, you wacky looking-"

He was understandably surprised when his victim suddenly ceased to be sprawled on the ground in a posture that suggested a fallen tree with too many branches and was suddenly behind him, with a large dagger pressed to his neck.

The dagger was also slightly wet. This was probably related to the mugger's suddenly lack of a gun hand.

His shrill screech of pain was interrupted by Johnny's repeated twisting of his hand. "What's wrong with you people?" The killer said to the mugger. "Are you too stupid to do anything else? Do you get off on the sense of power? Do you just like killing? Or are you just another one of them?"

An answer eluded the gun man, and he squealed something that might have been a pleading for mercy.

"No." Johnny said patiently. If one ignored how his eyes blazed in all but the literal sense, he had a unusually serene expression, giving him the look of a Buddhist monk gone mad from poisoning in the tofu and disgust at the depravity of Western society. "Now, because you called me wacky; tried to kill me and offend me in general, I'm going to quite messily kill you with needless cruelty. First, I'm going to need your gun."

The mugger's shock at being in the hands of a homicidal maniac dawned upon him, and his attempts at escaping were met with his being tossed into an alley, with Nny in hot pursuit.

Eleven minutes later, the store clerk started at the sight of a blood-soaked tall skinny man in his early twenties, who was currently holding a dollar in an out-streched hand and a cherry flavoured brain freezy in the other.

Two forces raged in the man's brain. One loudly demanded the intelligence in accepting money from a guy covered in blood, while the other pointed out that money was money. The first voice said that was a stupid idea, and the second told the other where it could go stuff itself in very explicit terms.

Obeying his merchant instincts, the clerk slipped the bill away from the happy man, and glanced at him happily skipping away.

Happily slurping at his beverage back at his car, Johnny picked up his diary, and wondered where he had left off, soon realizing it had something to do with the doughboys.

"Where did I leave off," he wondered. "Oh, yeah, the doughboys."

See? Author omnipotence is never wrong.

_Mr. Eff is easier to figure out. Like me at times, he was..well, I don't know the technical term, but he sure acted like a psychopathic sadist; always wanting me to kill and enjoy it. He wanted to be free; I can understand that. That is why I'm currently on a quest of emotional desensitization, after all. Always wanting me to kill and wanting me to enjoy it. He wanted to be free; I can understand that. That is why I'm currently on a quest of emotional desensitization, after all._

_But I've realized something, an advantage I had over the doughboys. I could change. I could rise above my squalor and become something less..I don't know, not homicidal maniacal. But Eff was doomed to be psychotic, and D-Boy would always be depressing. At least, that's what Nailbunny thought. And he was the most truthful of them._

_Under their spell, I killed and killed until those vile sacks of putrescence simply stopped screaming. They deserved it, too; they simply didn't deserve to live._

_At least, that's what I used to think._

_Before I started to think for myself, that is. Nailbunny helped me in that regard._

_He's always been around, my little spooky floating conscience. Even before the rabbit, he was there. Though it does irraitate me a bit to know that a hovering rabbit head knew more about my past then I did._

_Nailbunny claims that I did ghoulish things before, but for different reasons. For my own sake, I hope that has something to do with the fearful paintings that littered my house._

_The paintings; those spooky depictions of horrible monsters and unhappy sights. I wonder if they look, at least a little, like the monster in the wall._

_Reverend Meat; he's got to be like the doughboys. Always trying to get me to engage in my worst nature just because it occurs to me; he sounds like Eff._

_But, on the other hand, Mr. Samsa's point seems less attractive now. I've decided that perhaps emotional desensitization is not such a great idea after all. Now I'm wondering what to do._

_First I simply do what I want; then discover I'm being manipulated by a monster. Next, I have a really stupid dream, shave my hair off; find and kill an admirer of sorts; help Squee a bit and go off on a useless quest._

_I loathe my life._

_Speaking of which, when did it all begin? I can't even recall my early years._

_I really am lost. Both mentally and geographically. Not that _

_Wait. I already said that. Or is it write? Damn literal tense!_

_I mean, I don't even remember anything before I came to that house! I DON'T REMEMBER WHAT I WAS BEFORE I CAME THERE! I'M SPONTAENEOUSLY WRITING IN BIG BLOCKY LETTERS!_

_Shit, _he thought. _Did I just write that?_

Johnny paused again. Shaking from the exertion of recalling the emotion, he hesitated to put pen to paper again, but it's siren call was impossible to resist.

_I remember what I told Nailbunny; the possibility that I was talking to no more than various aspects of myself given voice. A interesting possibility. Unpleasant, but interesting._

_Where does the 'I' separate from the 'we'? Where am I capable of taking my own actions independent from any outside force? Where can I decide that I am capable of knowing that my motives are my own?_

_The monster in the wall was definitely a catalyst for my depressions; well, that and society at large. Fact is, I'm not convinced that it is responsible for the supernatural occurrences since then._

_It's still impossible for me to be captured by the authorites or die. I should know; I tried both yesterday. I jumped off a building for the hell of it and landed on a moving truck that crashed into a busload of Morbidly Obese Babies dolls. Not a single person paid attention to me; not even when I waved a pair of severed doll arms holding a sign that read **serial killer**._

_At first, I thought my immortality was a sort of really weird luck that happened to make it so that nothing could occur that kill me. luck that happened to prevent my death, no matter what occured-A gun's safety not being on, a tazer not being charged, only one bullet in the magazine..._

_It's occured to me since than that perhaps it's more complicated than that. It's occured to me that perhaps it's more complicated than that. If the monster is no longer around, then why can't I die? If I'm no longer the lock and key to it's imprisonment, than why am I still immortal?_

_Did I unplug the VCR? Crap! I didn't tape _The Stand_! I won't see Randal Flagg getting detonated!_

_Besides, more proof that I can be harmed._

_Devi hurt me. Not that I blame her. I did attempt to gut her like a trout and that does warrant a certain amount of animosity. What's important though, is that she injured me severely._

_If I can bleed and bruise, than my flesh isn't truly immortal, and that somehow, it is possible for me to die. _

_I hope so. If I can't die, and therefore pass from one state of existence to another, than I'm trapped._

_No explanation for the inability-to-get-caught thing though. Maybe if I did, I might get fat. _

_Another thing I've thought about is aliens. A lot of UFO buffs claim that they're either mindlessly malevolent or are superior in every conceivable way, but I doubt either._

_What if they're only human? _

_What if they are aliens or other people out there that are just as lost as I am? That loathe this society because of it's sheer stupidity, just like me? _

_I wish I could meet them._

_I've recently come to the realization that, perhaps, there is no easy answer for me. That I cannot be divested of my emotions, unpleasant though that may be._

_But if that's true and Psycho-Doughboy was right, than I really am tormented. Doomed to be happy for a time, but always to come crashing down to the depths of misery and depression._

_Perhaps there's no point in trying to stop my vulger drives. Perhaps I'm doomed to spend eternity in a squallor of a house, moping about incessantly, venturing out only to cause more pointless pain and suffering._

_Perhaps I'm doomed to wander endlessly, in this void of eternal twilight._

Johnny absently wiped the damp spots of the pages of his book.

He looked up, and saw the yellow moon. A baleful disc forever hanging in the sky, at least until the sun exploded, wiping the Earth and all that lived upon it away like dirt from glass.

Upon the velvet that it lay on, Johnny saw the stars. Those endlessly burning balls of flame, looking down upon him and his unwanted home without judgement, simply watching without feeling.

How lucky they were, not having to feel the endless misery that was his constant inheritance. As long as he knew how to wrap his hand around the handle of a blade or to simply fly in the sky in a constant peace, which required no awakening. But he couldn't ever have that opportunity. He was as constant as the nuclear core of the sun, but the fires that burned within him were, and always would be, cold as the moons of a dead world.

Johnny wanted to die. Well, not right now, anyway, but he welcomed the opportunity. He didn't want to just be here like a perpetually rolling rock; grinding off unwanted pieces on some formidable ground; cursed to have sharp parts nonetheless. He didn't want to be like the wind, bound to the chains born of the links of freedom and desire like the Reverend Meat said it (to) be. He didn't want to be the raging lunatic born of the demented fantasies of Mr. Eff, showered in the blood of a thousand victims that were merely in the wrong place at the right time. He didn't want to just off and die like Psycho-Doughboy so wanted. And he didn't have a clue what Nailbunny wanted him to be, besides healthy.

"I don't want to live like this," he whispered to himself. If you could call his existence living.

He laid his life recordings down, and without knowing that he had intended to do so, curled on to his back and clumsily into the fetal position that he had surely known in the one period of everyone's life when in a state of innocence, all was peace.

Johnny C. whimpered to himself as he shut his eyes and trembled, a stubborn trickle dampening his cheek. His hand cluched at his right arm, held loosely at an angle, a vague interpretation of his life.

Always, he was being strung around by someone or something, being a mere marionette to be dangled at the whims of a mysterious puppeter. But if released, it would dangle witlessly; perhaps a purpose in mind, but still an object of amusment for the puppeter, who would chortle at it's erratic and ultimately useless motions.

His sticklike limbs jerking as a result of the dry wracking sobs that had overtaken him, Johnny's thought wandered for a moment, and they settled on Squee.

Todd, the misfortunate child had said his name was to the pathetic predator in the mall. But from the moment Johnny had set eyes on him, he had seen what he had the potential to become.

True, he had come there determined to protect parents that didn't deserve it, and immobilized and frightened, he had uttered the sound that he made so often. Mistaking it for his name, Johnny christened him Squee. Seeing him from time to time, Johnny's initial impression of the kid's unhappiness grew deeper, espicially when he saw what a self-serving grotesque parody of a caretaker his father was.

Johnny knew the feelings that he felt in Squee's downward gaze when his father rhapsodized about how Squee's existence had ruined his life. He knew them very well indeed.

Johnny's memories were slowly but steadily returning. And he could recall a small child.

A child, small for his age, with dark blue hair that fought comb teeth aggresively and hated it when people made fun of him. Hated it a lot. Hated it when his dad whined about how much reponsibilty had been cast upon him, and how much of it his mother had been at fault. Hated it when his loving mother simply retreated from this to avoid getting yelled at, and sought resolution at the bottom of an acholic beverage. And most of all, hated it when the world started to turn on him for no good reason. A child who liked to dream, and draw little pictures. Scary, strange pictures, but they were better than here.

More than anything, Johnny did not want Squee to grow up to be a monster like him.

He remembered Squee's quiet little giggle of pleasure when he saw Johnny talking to Shmee just like he did, when Johnny didn't act like a monster when he spoke.

Then, he remembered Devi.

Sure, it had all come to ruin, on account of his listening to the doughboys. Sure, she had brutally beat him and then angrily overturned his apology over the phone. And it was a given that a great deal of that was his fault.

But they had had a pleasant relationship, hadn't they? He had been in a postition to give and receive affection, and he had. They had spoken nicelike. She had found Happy Noodle Boy funny. He had liked her paintings a lot, and had not heisitated to inform her of such. They had been happy. Perhaps, after all, as they might say in _The Dark Tower,_ they had been well-met after all.

And then there was the boy-child. Squee seemed to like him, and he had liked him. Nny had taught him well of the facts of life, saved him more than once, and had brained his dad quite hard. Plus, there was Shmee's evil. Nny was still unsure about that bear; to him, it's memory spoke lies still. He wondered what had become of Squeegee.

That dream. Did he truly die and go to a warped afterlife, or did a few twisted synapses just fire off another diseased imagining to torment him?

He had business to attend to.

Johnny thought of this, and a section of his madness divorced itself away from the rest of it, took the kids and hid itself away forever.

Slowly, he uncurled himself and opened his book again. Grabbing the pen, he paused for a moment, thinking on what to write.

_Die-ary, I'm not entirely happy._

_But maybe there's hope; if someone like me can feel affection, there's a chance the void can be denied after all._

Setting the diary, complete with finished entry, down, he drew out a copy of _The Wastelands_, cracked it open, and sipping his still cold Cherry Brain Freezy, began to read.

And for at least a while, forgot he was a homicidal maniac.


End file.
